Yijun Sun
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Profile
Yijun Sun is a media historian and theorist researching how the interaction between technology, materiality, and the human body shapes digital media and their precursors. Her work sits at the intersection of media theory, the history of technology, and cultural studies, with a focus on power, materiality, and embodiment. Yijun’s current book project centers on “media vessels” in electronic media history, exploring how everyday carriers, such as containers, play a crucial role in enabling and sustaining technological systems. Her other projects address embodied visuality in virtual and real space, histories of computer screens and electronic imaging, feminist technics in media history, and material histories of artificial intelligence.
Yijun is set to receive her Ph.D. from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her essays appear in journals such as Cultural Critique (link) and Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies (link). Her latest co-authored chapter, “Carried Away: The Carrier Bag Theory of Media,” is featured in Technics: Media in the Digital Age (Link to the book). Yijun’s research has been supported by institutions including the Hagley Museum & Library, and she has been a research fellow at the Collaborative Research Center “Media of Cooperation” at the University of Siegen.
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Presentations
“Media Box: On Interfaces, Humans, and Things.” Annual Meeting of the Society for Social Studies of Science, Honolulu, HI, November 8-11, 2023.
“Black Box and the Media Order of Things: An Archaeology of Electronic Media.” The 36th Annual Meeting of the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, October 26-29, 2023.
“On the Glass Envelope Technology: From the Light Bulb to the Vacuum Tube.” Society for the History of Technology Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA, November 10-13, 2022.
“On the Container Technology of Electricity: Sparks, Shocks, and the Glass Interface.” 4S/ESOCITE Joint Meeting, Cholula, Mexico, December 7-10, 2022.
“The Spirits of Wireless: Ghost Hunting in the 19th Century Wireless Engineering.” Society for the History of Technology Annual Meeting with History of Science Society, New Orleans, LA, November 18-21, 2021.
“Between Display and Memory: A Media Archaeology of Vacuum Tubes, 1897-1948.” Annual Meeting of the Society for Social Studies of Science, Toronto, ON, October 6-9, 2021.
“Entropy/Negentropy: Machine Metaphors in Early 20th Century Architecture Knowledge Production.” The 35th Annual Conference of the Society for Literature, Science and the Arts, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, September 30-October 2, 2021.
“The Desire to See: Binary System, Architectural Space and the Ontology of Being-With.” 4S-EASST 2020 Conference, virtual Prague, August 18-21, 2020.
“Through the Looking Glass: Optical Operations of the Anthropotechnique.” Philosophy of Communication Division, National Communication Association’s 105th Annual Convention, Baltimore, MD, November 13-17, 2019.
“The Desire to See: Optical Constructions of the Architectural Space After the Enlightenment.” Scholar to Scholar, National Communication Association’s 105th Annual Convention, Baltimore, MD, November 13-17, 2019.
“Between Touch and Vision: Resistance and Perceptions in Typewriting History.” Philosophy of Communication Division, National Communication Association’s104th Annual Convention, Salt Lack City, UT, November 7-11, 2018.
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Presentations
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Publications
Journal Articles
Yijun Sun (2023). “From Glows to Graphics: The Invention of Visuality in Early Electronic Media Systems.” Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, vol 29, issue 5, pp. 1136-1150. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/13548565231193954.
Yijun Sun (2023). “The Desire to See: Binary Systems, Architectural Space, and the Ontology of Being-with.” Cultural Critique, issue 118, pp. 1-22. DOI: 10.1353/cul.2023.0007.
Book ChaptersYijun Sun and Bernard Geoghegan (2024). “Carried Away: The Carrier Bag Theory of Media.” In Technics: Media in the Digital Age, “The Key Debates” series, edited by Nicholas Baer and Annie van den Oever. Amsterdam University Press (Peer-reviewed), pp. 169-186. https://www.aup.nl/en/book/9789048564552/technics.
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